Some communications receiver systems receive a continuous time signal that must be scaled appropriately before being sampled by an analog to digital converter (ADC) to produce sampled digitized signals. Ideally, the continuous time signal being input to the ADC is scaled appropriately to effectively utilize the full range of the ADC, otherwise, quantization noise and/or saturation from the output of the ADC can severely degrade the performance of the system. Appropriately amplifying the input signal is a difficult task given that the amplitude (prior to amplification) can rapidly change with time and be affected by a number of different factors, such as transmitter-receiver separation and weather conditions in wireless applications, or the read-head fly-height and temperature effects in magnetic storage applications. Existing techniques for controlling the amplitude have a number of drawbacks. Thus, improved techniques for controlling the gain applied to the input signal to the ADC would be desirable.